How I Finally Got Organized so I Could Enjoy my Family

Thanks for joining me for the Rediscovering Joy in Motherhood series! You can find all of the posts here.

How I Finally Organized My Life so I Could Enjoy my Family

In one of the previous posts in this series, I shared a little bit about how I’m decluttering our house. I got tired of stepping on and over things that we really didn’t need and weren’t bringing any value to our lives and so I am being quite strict with myself as I get rid of things that no longer matter, in exchange for finding more joy in my home. There are seven practical tips to help you declutter your home in that post as well!

After we work on clearing out the clutter in our homes, it’s a good next step to take a look at how organized we are (or are not)!

About a year ago, I was getting ready for my yearly “coaching season”. From December through the end of April, I spend two afternoons a week and about every other Saturday coaching a competitive speech team at a local high school. This has been such an amazing opportunity to be a part of and truly became a ministry for me. The students I have worked with over the past five years are a great blessing to me as well!

But because it was my fifth season in this job, I knew that it would get really crazy for a few months as far as meals, cleaning and other tasks….unless I got our family organized.

I had learned from the first two years of my coaching that my family could easily fall to the wayside if I wasn’t prepared. Scrambling around, not knowing what to eat each night for dinner, and having a house that had sunk into chaos wasn’t my idea of a good time.

Have you ever been there? Let me encourage you and give you some practical tips to begin organizing three key areas of your family life.

3 Ways I Organized Our Family Life

My house and life are not completely organized to a “T”. But I finally buckled down and got organized enough–to a point where I didn’t feel frazzled every moment of every day. Want to know what I did and if it stuck? Read on :)

1. I started keeping a calendar/planner of events, both for our family schedule and for my blog.

I don’t use a complicated system. In fact, often I use this daily chart that I shared about in a previous post along with a few printouts that I’ve gathered from around the internet. In my three ring “home binder” is the following:

Printout of 14 Scriptures to pray over your children (you can find those here as a free download in the form of cards or here for the one-sheet free printable!)

**IN 2016 SO FAR, I have been using the Daily Planner by Sue Hooley for my portable planner, i.e, the planner where I plug in the “short version” information from my larger planners. It’s really fab, because it has tabbed sections for monthly, weekly and daily schedules. There’s a space on the daily calendar pages to write your menu for that day and also tabs in the back for notes, info and shopping lists that you can tear off (3 per page). It’s pretty awesome and I’d highly recommend! You can find it on Amazon!

This is not a perfect system. There are days that I neglect to use my home binder. There are times I get caught off guard. Remember, progress, not perfection!

2. I Started Planning Meals and Making Use of Freezer Cooking

I got tired of not knowing what was going to be for supper. On the afternoons I was gone at speech practice these last few months, having something in the crockpot / slow cooker for the evening meal was fabulous. I sincerely believe slow cookers are as valuable to a busy mom as a life raft is to a person who is drowning.

Basically what I do to meal plan is look at every week and figure out what we had going on as far as events or commitments. It made it easy to decide whether I needed a freezer and/or crock pot meal or whether I could make something more time-intensive each night. I have a programmable crock pot similar to this one:

Most of my crock pot recipes can be found on my Crock Pot Pinterest Board. So easy to access from the app on my iPad! There is a great cookbook I use frequently called Fix-It and Forget It. I also have a couple recipes that I’ve shared on my blog, which we use during the cold months:

3. I began a basic cleaning and taught my kids how to clean too.

Keeping a home clean when you have four children is much easier if you teach them how to help! Here are 8 ways to teach your child to help with chores without complaining! We have used these techniques and they really work. Of course we do have some complaining, but it is mostly managed :) We have been working to teach our children to clean since they were very small. It has paid off. But even if you have not done this, it’s not too late to start!

I also decided on a basic schedule for household tasks. Vacuuming & mopping is on Monday (because my husband’s day off is Monday and he’s home to help keep the toddler off the wet floor and away from the vacuum), laundry is on Thursdays (and I do it from morning to night so it all gets done!) and Wednesdays are for cleaning the two bathrooms. The kids need to put away their laundry themselves (the 19 month old gets help of course) and they help each night to clear and wipe down the table and sweep. We do a five minute pickup at the end of the night as a family, although sometimes I do it myself if the day just gets busy. I find doing dishes at night to be therapeutic, and my kids help hand wash sporadically throughout the week.

To help our children do the laundry (sort-of) on their own, I created this How to Sort Laundry Printable that you can get for free here at the blog. I printed it out at Office Max (it has lots of black ink) and hung it in our laundry room.

It did the trick for the 6 and 9 year old! The four year old has fun learning colors and sorting with mom. The 19 month old has fun sitting in the laundry piles and trying to start the washing machine with no clothes in it.

When you work to organize these three areas of your family’s life, it is surprising how much calmer and confident you will feel as a mom! I’m not talking about perfection, but rather simple steps in the right direction.

Can I give you some extra encouragement in this area? Our home does not always run like a well-oiled machine. There are many times when the laundry doesn’t all get done in one day or the meal plan goes unused.

However, one of the huge benefits to organizing these three main areas of your family’s life is that if everyone is sick for a week or you’re gone on vacation and out of your routine, you will have created a basic system you can fall back on when life resumes its normal rhythm.

Having these management tools set up and in place allows you regain order and peace in your home and settle back into a more streamlined routine.

As with any routine, it will need to change at some point. But right now, this works well. I feel that these are three essential areas of life (meal planning, daily/weekly planning and cleaning) that can be organized in any family!

Investing some time up front to organize your home and familyin just two or three key areas can take a load off your shoulders so that you aren’t constantly thinking about what’s for dinner, not remembering when that doctor’s appointment is or shoving laundry into overflowing hampers, but instead enjoying spending more time with your family!

One More Thing….

There’s a really great resource that you can grab for four more days only that bundles together ebooks, ecourses, tons of organizational tools & printables and also some fabulous bonuses (the Grove Collaborative cleaning products are my favorite!) for a really tiny price. It’s called the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle and I wanted to quickly show you the organizational “tools” that is contains:

I’ve been using some of these organizational tools already to give me a “refresh” in streamlining my daily routine:

Cozy Minimalist Mom from The Nester (AH-mazing eCourse that gives me so many fresh ideas for simplifying!)

Sweet Life Planner (sharing one of the creator’s pics because they’re way prettier than mine)

There’s so much more than just these that I’ve shared. Don’t miss this bundle, it is a value (over $1,300) that is just UNREAL and a place where you can find the actionable tools you need for a (more) smoothly running home plus tons more inspiration for your family and life! For just $29.97.

If you want to learn more about this bundle and get the details, just click here or the button below! Happy organizing!

Hi, I'm Jenn! I'm happily married to my college sweetheart, mother to four wonderfully spunky children and a woman who needs a whole lot of Jesus! I spend most of my time taking care of my home and family, reading good books, blogging and dreaming up ways that I can finally have a perfectly organized home--ha!

Great post … thank you for sharing. While I do not have a family of my own yet, I hope to have one some day and I enjoy learning and taking tips from others how to have a happy and organized home! Blessings, ~Sarah (visiting from Radical Femininity)Sarah Washburn recently posted…How To Submit When I Think He’s Acting Unreasonable

Great tips! I feel like I am always trying to find new ways to get my family organized (and then keep them organized). I love the idea of different planners and calenders…I like to see everything written out! Thanks for sharing!

This sounded interesting until I got to the part of doing laundry all day to get it done. You are obviously a stay at home mom and your job is taking care of the home and kids. Working a full time job, and still needing to take care of home and kids, makes a very different scenario.

Deb, what works for one person does not work for another. I do work part-time, by the way. If I worked full time, I’d probably spend Saturday or Sunday doing my laundry so I could get it done in one day, or I’d split it up, maybe doing a couple of loads per day until it’s all done. This post isn’t an end all, be all, it’s just something that worked for me. As I said in my post, “the point is to find something that works for you”.

Debbie, I work and travel with my job and have been menu planning, decluttering, doing certain cleaning on different days, and doing laundry throughout the week. Having a sorter for laundry has helped. We also clean together, as many hands make light work. I use way more crockpot meals, but prep them 4 hours one Saturday a month. It has been a wonderful stress reducer. Hope this helps God bless.

I love this! I love the grace you have with yourself to say “I’m going to work at it but it’s a learning-through-living endeavor.” I see joy sucked out of my motherhood journey when I’m preoccupied with all the stuff. And I find joy in abundance when I can breathe and be present. Here is to a new year of being present, organized, and full of grace! ;)Summer recently posted…Fierce Thankfulness

You are right, freezer cooking and crockpot cooking make life so much easier on hectic days! Thank you for this great post, I enjoyed it. And, I am glad to know I am not the only one who does laundry all in one day. 😊

I would love to do better meal planning! Seems like I can’t stay consistent with it yet. Thanks for all of the tips! On you blog calendar, I’d suggest using small colored post it notes to schedule. I use those and it makes rescheduling/moving a post on the calendar so much easier! 😊